(Thread IKs:
fatherboxx)
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You guys are being unnecessarily lovely on Finnish cheese, and the Russians smuggling it. There's no need to shoplift when they have access to cash and can just buy it at the supermarket. I suspect the reason Russians love Oltermanni is because it's 1) cheap, 2) nearby and 3) obviously better than anything they have available domestically. Also, as far as flavor goes, Oltermanni is a creamy cheese that's a bit softer than an edam or gouda. It's nothing that anyone in Central Europe would need to fly to Finland for, but it's nearby. Here's a link I found with minimal googling. Edit: Trying to shift away from the cheese derail: Has anyone seen any reports of Ukraine using GLSDB yet? There seemed to be reports about Sweden releasing them for export to Ukraine like a month or so ago, but since then it seems to have been quiet. Probably saving them for the offensive, as the stocks were reportedly not too high? Paranoea fucked around with this message at 10:01 on Apr 1, 2023 |
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Apr 1, 2023 09:52
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:32 |
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Thanks for the GLSDB analysis, everyone. I went and checked, and I probably misremembered some wishcasting from Defmon a few months back. Also, the Sweden thing was because of the Saab in Saab-Boeing, while I completely forgot Boeing was involved. *cough* So, I guess it's still several months away until we see these kinds of booms.
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Apr 1, 2023 14:47
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It was set on the day Finland's NATO application was officially ratified (approved? accepted?). So: *hacker voice* I'm in.
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Apr 7, 2023 20:03
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There has been reporting here and there of Russian soldiers having absolutely godawful field first aid kits (think, tourniquet + vodka). None of us here know the actual figures, but assuming Russian care for their wounded has improved significantly since WW II is probably a bit of a stretch. On 200k casualties, I don't see how this is completely outside of the realm of possibility, or how the war would be won if that number were true? The initial invading force was reported at around 160-170k (+LNR & DNR?), there was some reinforcement stream (unquantified) when it was clear their first shock & awe strategy didn't work, and the mobilization figures floated were around 400k. Sooo, even with numbers that have been reported, 160+400-200 = 360k (iimplied) soldiers still on the front. I know this math probably doesn't stand to much scrutiny, but at least it's indicative.
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Apr 28, 2023 18:19
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https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1659918138173956097?s=20 Ukraine is disputing retreating from the city. Thread has more.
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May 20, 2023 17:01
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Lum_ posted:Are you asking about Maupin or the guy calling Putin a great leftist? "Not really" being the answer to both. Neither is Tara Reade. It really is mentally exhausting reading their projection. Somehow, everyone is at war with Russia, while Russia is not at war with anyone (only a very limited SMO, after all). I've mentally tuned out people like Lavrov since the caravan of peace in 2014, where at least in local media he was the figurehead for assuring the global community that there is in fact food and medical supplies in those trucks headed for DNR & LNR, not weapons and troops. And Medvedev has obviously just been a joke for the entire duration of the 2022-> war. I don't know why we even bother paying any attention to him.
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May 31, 2023 08:35
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Girkin posting an update on liberated villages on the Zaporizhzhia front: https://twitter.com/GirkinGirkin/status/1667926622383620098 Nothing age-restricted about the tweet, it's just a telegram post, translated + small map of villages liberated / currently being fought over. Edit: \/\/\/ Ah, oops. Sorry, got my Twitter Russians confused there. Corrected now. Still can't seem to get the twee to embed though. :-/ \/\/\/ Paranoea fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jun 11, 2023 |
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Jun 11, 2023 17:26
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Finnish OSINT team posts a refresher on what to expect when Ukraine eventually reaches the proper defensive lines on the Zaporizhzhia front. Brady Africk on Twitter has posted a lot along the same lines about defensive positions throughout the front, but like Emil notes in his thread, the Zaporizhzhia side is the most heavily fortified. Even if the 10 battalions are real, Ukraine has their work cut out for them. https://twitter.com/emilkastehelmi/status/1671399475028414465?s=20 Emil et al. get regular retweets from people like Michael Kofman and Def Mon, as well as being a staple in all the credible Finnish media outlets, so you can probably trust their analysis here.
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Jun 21, 2023 14:13
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LifeSunDeath posted:Also all his men are probably getting put in prison to keep any future uprisings from happening Well, there's zero chance of them getting out of there until they've served their term. Like, say get recruited to join a PMC or something.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:14
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Twitter experts of reasonable standing seem to be saying that we should withhold judgment until about two months into the counteroffensive. Kofman reminded us in a War on the Rocks podcast a while back that this far into the Kherson offensive, it would've been considered a failure (meatgrinder, Russians were clearly not fleeing, incredibly slow progress, if any).
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Jun 30, 2023 16:41
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Well, to be fair, they do consider themselves the Third Roman Empire, so conquering is definitely worth it against that backdrop... And weren't the expectations among Russian ruling class that after their (wildly unrealistic) attack succeeds, European powers and the US will grumble for a while, and then forgive them in the spirit of not disrupting business and severing existing economic ties. They were delusional, but rational within their own framework. Edit: Sorry, this was in response to BillsPhoenix->Fatherboxx->Rapapaport Paranoea fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 17:33
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Enjoy posted:or Ukrainian concentration camps? Who is reporting on these camps? What type of objective evidence has been provided so far? Russia's equivalent could be confirmed by satellite imagery and via the Red Cross. I would expect similar types of evidence here.
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Jul 9, 2023 17:07
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Has the pincer/cauldron/motti at Bakhmut been confirmed by anyone credible? I no longer have Twitter, but don't recall seeing anything posted in this thread, at least. NoelReports were being thrown around elsewhere and, well.
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Jul 11, 2023 19:10
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Kofman spoke to this in a recent War on the Rocks episode: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2lo9HVCtRhvRqzPz67OfYt?si=T5LFWCJ6TaGb8NzMRw2e2g. My takeaway from it was that the level of attrition on either side is unknown to us as outside observers, until we see something break. Which may or may not happen. (Recommend to listen to the episode for a bunch of other analysis too, as Kofman is a very level-headed analyst in my view.)
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Jul 13, 2023 12:21
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Maybe they're just really really sad that their Kalibrs have been getting Patrioted? So, need to get working on the next UNBLOCKABLE projectile.
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Jul 19, 2023 18:11
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On the Kharkiv front, has anyone seen any good reports on what's going on? I'm seeing on the Finnish OSINT tracker map a note of the Russians successfully crossing a river, so I suppose the 100k troops placed there are getting somewhere? https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/The-War-in-Ukraine/091194
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Jul 24, 2023 17:05
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MikeC posted:They have been pushing that area on and off continuously for months now. There supposedly is a 4 division RuAF reserve being trained and refitted in that area but no one can say for sure. The likelihood of some major RuAF breakthrough is probably low as the same OSINT/milbloggers have indicated that the Ukrainians have moved reserves with Western vehicles in response. Thanks. Yeah, I remember the Russians raising alarm over Ukrainian troop build-up a while back. I guess there's going to be the usual attack/counter-attack dynamic until something more dramatic worth talking about happens, and then ww hear about it.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:51
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MikeC posted:[...] this actually isn't even in the right direction for a push to Tomak to say that this is part of the main defensive line. Curious why you're making this point? I can see a road leading from Robotyne to Tokmak, so wouldn't bypassing the town put Ukraine on that road? Or would this leave their flanks too exposed or something similar? In other news, Mike Kofman seems a lot more gloomy than before in the latest War on the Rocks podcast: https://warontherocks.com/2023/07/an-inflection-point-in-ukraines-counteroffensive/. He doesn't seem to believe Ukraine will reach any of their major goals during the offensive. With still the perpetual unknown of Russian troop attrition, although he continues to maintain Russians even in the south are not completely without reserves.
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Jul 27, 2023 18:56
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Remember that Ukraine still hasn't penetrated the first proper defensive line, just the initial defensive positions, owing to Russia's fierce defense of everything (vs. defense in depth, like noted earlier here). No one knows for sure how many reserves Russia has to pull on, so whether or not the two defensice lines between Ukraine's current position and Tokmak will be properly manned us anyone's guess (Mike Kofman refused to believe Russian reserves are exhausted in his previous War on the Rocks visit, but that still leaves room for a lot of options). On the other hand, Ukrainian elite forces that were previously being held back to push on those breaks in the line are now veing committed (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...unteroffensive/). I'm not an expert on any of this, but would personally conside är the offensive successful if they reach Tokmak by mud season. And they may be months away from that if the current rate of progress continues.
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Aug 18, 2023 18:04
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saratoga posted:Long range cruise missiles to target Russian air bases and railroad facilities inside Russia. Has there been a single instance so far where European or US weapons have been "approved" to be used beyond Ukrainian borders? What makes you think this would change with the F-16?
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Aug 21, 2023 14:44
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Ah, fair enough, I missed that we're ignoring optics there. My bad.
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Aug 21, 2023 14:49
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I don't think you need to get more convoluted with the theories beyond: the Putin-led mafia state values loyalty above everything else, and Prig marching on Moscow was seen as a betrayal by Putin.
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Aug 24, 2023 15:08
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spankmeister posted:So this genius decided to take a little vacation in Finland or what? The reporting implies that he was probably a frequent visitor (registered in the Finnish population registry with a temporary address in St. Petersburg). So, might have had a permanent visa or somesuch, seeing as we've stopped granting new tourist visas. e: f;b, but I'm pretty sure permanent visas have not been cancelled, so this person could've been permitted to cross the border on a regular basis, and only recently the police decided to pick him up. All speculation, of course.
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Aug 25, 2023 09:14
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Nord Stream was a means of waging hybrid warfare on the EU and Germany specifically, and it was being used for that from '21 onwards (throttling gas flow due to "repairs" in order to starve Germany of gas reserves for the coming winter). It is objectively good that it's gone, and who ultimately blew it up is a red herring that should impact no one's opinion of the war, or influence any policy decisions.
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Aug 26, 2023 11:21
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There have already been videos of Russians retreating from the forward positions and running into their own minefields, haven't there? So, my understanding is that the first primary line of defense will be more of the same + those famous hollowed-out dragon's teeth that we've been seeing since last year. The only unknown, as we've been saying, is the shape of Russian reserves. Oh, and ISW was reporting that Russia is committing their remaining (?) elite forces to the battle now, so I suppose that means both sides are more-or-less considering this the last push of 2023.
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Aug 29, 2023 07:14
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I'm pretty sure those who are interested have already seen it, but War on the Rocks's latest episode was exactly on the topic of winning the peace (with Kofman and Stephen Kotkin, apparently famous history nerd). I thought the points Kotkin put forward made a lot of sense, and are aligned with the above as well. https://warontherocks.com/2023/08/how-ukraine-can-win-the-peace-a-conversation-with-stephen-kotkin/, in case anyone hasn't listened yet. Since deleting Twitter, Warontherocks and this thread mostly keep me up to speed with what's going on. 
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Aug 30, 2023 13:18
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Morrow posted:This is the other thing: Ukraine can't really make peace with Putin. He's spent the last thirty years demonstrating that any agreement or treaty is only valid as long as it's convenient to him. Prigozhin is the most recent example of that, but Minsk 1 and 2 are previous Ukrainian attempts. Minsk 3 would just be a ceasefire while Putin tries to rearm faster than Ukraine can. Which is why no future peace treaty can come without credible security guarantees that Putin wouldn't want to test. And not sure if there's appetite for that in the US (yet?), because let's face it, whatever parties to the security agreement there would hypothetically be, the US would have to be among them.
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Aug 30, 2023 16:22
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Dick Ripple posted:Threatening Donetsk would be bad news for the Russians, and we can only hope this turns into another Kharkiv scenario. Isn't this one of the original three axes of counterattack that Ukraine tried to open? From Velyka Novosilka down towards Mariupol? So might be Ukrainians just gently reviving that axis, for whatever purpose.
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Sep 5, 2023 21:30
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New War on the Rocks with Kofman dropped: https://warontherocks.com/2023/09/one-tree-line-at-a-time-breaching-russian-defenses-in-ukraine/. I suspect nothing surprising to folks in this thread, but Mike does not believe the current offensive is going to culminate in anything definitive, and advises everyone to prepare for a pro-longed war. Also doesn't believe that this offensive will not force Russia to come to the negotiating table.
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Sep 29, 2023 07:58
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ShadowHawk posted:For additional context I should note that most Russian Internet traffic goes out through overland cables to the West. Basically no one hosts Russian datacenters, so a typical Russian connection is hoping to land on a server in Finland if not further away in central or western Europe. I think the data connection being severed mainly impacted Estonia, not Finland (or Russia for that matter). Finland connects to the Internet at large by way of Sweden, so much so that anecdotally I did not hear anyone in Finland complain, or even notice a drop in their connectivity following this. Reporting in Finland is also almost entirely focusing on the gas pipe, mostly even neglecting to mention that there was a data cable severed as well.
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Oct 10, 2023 21:10
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WarpedLichen posted:https://twitter.com/Tatarigami_UA/status/1720814139600232737#m Tatarigami's been making GBS threads on Syrski for a long time now. I think at least in June when the first minefields were hit during the counteroffensive, I remember seeing some strong words given.
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Nov 7, 2023 05:50
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 01:32 |
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This wasn't posted here yet: Russia recently launched one of the biggest armored vehicle assaults of the war. It didn't go well, but apparently shows Russia's renewed interest in committing tanks and BMPs on the front line.
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Apr 2, 2024 15:16
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